With the holiday season upon us, people are out shopping for that perfect gift, which means call centers are busier than ever. And whether the phone is answered by a veteran agent or a temp seasonal worker, your customers expect the same level of service and agent performance every time they call. Customers at this time of year tend to be more stressed than usual, so they want to speak with an agent who is congenial and knowledgeable. However, agents cannot convey this attitude if they are also feeling stressed and anxious. Here are a couple of tips to ensure your agents always provide the best customer experience – during the holidays or any time of the year.
Incorporate a Continuous Training Environment
Comprehensive training is essential to ensuring agents perform at their very best, and the level of quality should be the same for all agents. But rather than simply giving them training at the start of their employment and then kicking them out of the metaphorical nest, agent training should be an ongoing process. After all, your customers are continuously changing, so your call center needs to be able to adapt to those changes. Using a call monitoring solution such as speech analytics for training is both effective and efficient, as you can use examples from actual phone conversations to convey to your agents best practices, rather than simply using hypotheticals. Speech analytics can help agents gain a better understanding of how to improve their skills, and how to handle a variety of situations that may arise, which can greatly ease the seasonal stress for customers.
Make Necessary Script Adjustments
Call center scripts are great tools for agents to have, especially newer agents. But many customers feel these scripts make an agent come across as stilted and artificial, lowering their confidence in said agent’s abilities. But with a few tweaks, you can create scripts that sound natural and pleasing. For instance, you can read your scripts out loud to see if they flow well or if they sound too affected. Also, make sure you’re not having your agents read scripts that are too verbose in parts where succinctness would work much better. Remember, your customers don’t want to waste time. You can even use speech analytics to listen to conversations to see if any parts of the scripts are not having the desired results, as well as help agents become more confident in off-script situations so they will be able to improvise with ease. The better your script sounds to the customer, the happier they will be.
The more training and information agents have, the better they’ll be able to assist customers with both speed and accuracy. And speech analytics can help provide prompt feedback on performances, including both assistance and praise. Agents need to be motivated beyond simply the status quo. You can make this happen.
Learn how CallFinder’s solutions work to help you improve agent performance, not only during the holidays, but all year long.
